I am the president of Metis Strategy, a CIO advisory firm that I founded in 2001. I have advised many of the best chief information officers at multi-billion dollar corporations in the United States and abroad. I've written for the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, CIO Insight, Information Week and several other periodicals. I am also the author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation (Wiley Press, September 2014) and of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Wiley Press, December 2009), a book on leading IT practices that has sold over 12,000 copies around the world. Since 2008, I have moderated a widely listened to podcast entitled “The Forum on World Class IT,” which features a wide array of IT thought-leaders, and is available at www.forumonworldclassit.com on a biweekly basis. I have been the keynote speaker at a host of corporate conferences and universities in the US, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, China, India, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. You can reach me at peter.high [at] metisstrategy.com or on Twitter @WorldClassIT

Upon meeting him, you would not necessarily guess that Bill Schlough collects jewelry, but he is the proud owner of two of the most coveted rings in America: World Series Championship rings that he earned as CIO of the San Francisco Giants, garnered after the 2010 and 2012 teams won it all.

For our baseball fan readers, please try to push past the jealousy to understand the many interesting aspects of Schlough’s story. He graduated from Duke with an engineering degree and has an MBA from Wharton, and has been working in sports since World Cup USA 1994, the biggest soccer tournament in the world. He worked at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and landed as the CIO of the San Francisco Giants in 1999, giving him an impressively long tenure in that role.

Schlough’s “plus” came as he and his colleagues with the Giants saw an opportunity to increase the synergies between the Major League team and the Class-A affiliate San Jose Giants. He first joined San Jose as interim-CEO on a six month stint starting in August of 2011. He has continued on as Chairman of that club, identifying more opportunities to collaborate, grow the business and leverage technology for player development purposes along the way, as he mentions in my interview with him below.

(This is the tenth in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior nine interviews with the CIO-pluses from companies like Waste Management, McKesson, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Ameristar Casinos, Owens Corning, Marsh & McLennan, and ADP please click this link. To receive notice about future interviews in the series with CIO-pluses of Walgreens and P&G, please click the “Follow” link above. To hear a more in depth podcast interview check out the Forum on World Class IT interview with Schlough here.)

Peter High: Bill, you have a unique CIO-plus role. For a time you were not only CIO of the Giants as you are now and have been for 14 years, but you were also the interim-CEO of the Giants’ minor league affiliate, the Class A San Jose Giants. You now serve as the Chairman of that team. Let’s begin with the business’s rationale in purchasing the minor league affiliate, as I know that is not a common practice in Major League Baseball.

Bill Schlough, CIO of the San Francisco Giants and Chairman of the San Jose Giants

Bill Schlough: The San Francisco Giants acquired a majority interest in the San Jose Giants a few years ago, and you are right – it is not a common practice in Major League Baseball. Most team’s minor league affiliates run independently. The San Francisco Giants made this decision and it’s a strategic decision particularly at the single-A level, because that’s where a lot of player development takes place. Player development is a key priority for us, and it really makes sense to have those incentives aligned. We feel that if the club remained independent with independent ownership, they may favor profitability over developing and winning and that really is what it’s all about for us at the minor league level is developing and winning. And the reason we want to win is not because it drives revenues, we want to win because we want our players to grow accustomed to that winning culture.

We’re both in the same business, of course. The San Jose Giants draw a few thousand fans per game whereas we draw forty plus thousand fans a game, but we’re both in the business of baseball. The San Jose Giants host 70 games, we host 81 in San Francisco and we all have similar functions like Marketing and Accounting (to name only two), but they actually have some similar IT needs that cut across the entire organization. We felt it made a lot of sense to create linkages between those different business units and the minor league level and the major league level.

Peter High: What was the original rationale in having you perform the dual roles as CIO and CEO, and what did you bring from the former to benefit the latter?

Bill Schlough: About a year and half ago, our CEO in San Jose stepped down unexpectedly, making a move to the NBA. When he did that, the San Francisco Giants saw it as a great opportunity to try to build in synergy between the San Francisco Club and the San Jose Club.

I think there were two primary reasons that I was chosen for this role. First, the CIO touches every aspect of the business, and we, as CIOs, have to be familiar with every aspect of business, and because of that I have relationships with all of the different leaders of business units within the San Francisco Giants. Recognizing that the CEO role, naturally, touches all parts of the organization, there was a logical connection between the roles. It was a great opportunity for me to go down there, to understand the San Jose business, and to build bridges, to facilitate introductions, and to identify opportunities where we could learn from each other.

It was determined from the start that this would be an interim role, and that we would search for my replacement. Therefore, for six months, I held the CEO role. In my current role as Chairman, I continue to foster collaboration, identify synergies, and otherwise solidify the bridges built between our organizations.

As CIO, I feel like it’s incumbent upon all of us, not just to know technology, but also know the business that we’re in and understand to the best of our ability, the business of all of the different chiefs within an organization. And so I think that’s kind of the expertise that I brought and not every business unit had had that much insight into the operations of all of the different aspects of the business, but I think the CIO is uniquely qualified to do that. It was a great experience for me. I really think I learned a lot and really built strong ties between the San Francisco and San Jose organizations.

The second reason that I was chosen for this role is that I live almost equidistant between San Francisco and San Jose. I like to think that the other reasons weighed more heavily, but this factor did not hurt.

Peter High: Can you provide some examples of the synergies you have wrought in your dual role?

Bill Schlough: One example is the sharing of equipment on a concession side. When we have excess concession equipment in San Francisco, we can send it to San Jose, generating a big savings for us. We’ve merged our community activities. We had separate community funds between San Jose and San Francisco. We’ve now merged those. We’re working together on the retail operation side, so we can join forces to jointly sell San Jose and San Francisco merchandise. We work together in terms of field maintenance. The list goes on and on.

Notice that most of these are not traditional IT initiatives. By playing a role in San Francisco that enabled me to get to know the various facets of that business, I felt well equipped to suggest valuable ideas that had little to do with IT.

Peter High: Your example is a great one to highlight how the CIO role is one that provides the glue across the organization, and can provide unique insights about the business that go far beyond the traditional IT domain. I think it is a powerful example for other CIOs that they are well equipped to forge these kinds of bonds.

How did you divide your time between the San Francisco and San Jose Clubs when your “plus” role was CEO, and how has that changed now that it is that of Chairman?

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